How Fast Are the World's Top Shopping Sites?

The median for the top 500 e-commerce home pages takes 10 seconds to load. In spring 2012, the median page loaded in 6.8 seconds. This represents a 47 percent slowdown in just two years. Even worse, 10 percent of pages took 20 seconds or longer to load.

Radware®, a leading provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, announced the release of its latest quarterly study titled "State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Spring 2014."

Chief among the research, Radware's latest study reveals that, while 75 percent of the top 100 retail websites employ a content delivery network (CDN), the median home page takes a full second longer to become interactive than the median page that does not use a CDN.

CDNs help bring resources closer to users by caching static page resources in distributed servers across a region or worldwide. In theory, this Web performance solution reduces the amount of time it takes a host server to receive, process and deliver on a request for a page resource (images, CSS files, etc.).

Radware's latest research shows that the median time to interact (TTI) for CDN-enabled sites was 5.7 seconds compared to the median TTI of 4.7 for non-CDN websites.

"This finding should not be interpreted as a criticism of content delivery networks," says Kent Alstad, vice president of acceleration for Radware. "Instead, it should create awareness that CDNs address just one aspect of the performance problem. Web pages today are bigger and more complicated than ever, and CDNs can only partially mitigate this growth and complexity. Site owners need to be aware that there are performance issues caused by the pages themselves, and these performance issues require additional solutions."

"While a one-second delay in interactivity does not seem significant, it can actually produce a significant negative impact on key performance indicators," continues Alstad. "Our previous studies have shown that a one-second delay has increased bounce rates by 8.3 percent, decreased page views by 9.3 percent and even showed a 2.1 percent decrease in cart size, all of which can be detrimental to an eRetailer."